THE THEORY OF COGNITIVE RESONANCE
as a Foundation for Dialectical Hermeneutics
by
GERALD MARK KENNEY
B.A. University at Buffalo, 1964
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of Master of Arts
in the Department of English
in the College of Arts and Sciences
at the University of Central Florida
Orlando, Florida
Spring Term
2003
Abstract
This thesis is a search for the roots of literary criticism in human nature. It defines literature as the artful practice of language in any mode, and determines language to be artful either when an author produces language in a recognized artistic format or an auditor perceives the use of language as edifying. This thesis distinguishes language as a uniquely human feature emerging with technology at the time when hominid ancestors emerged as bipedal. It describes how individuals acquire language and develop linguistic skills. Based on the anthropological and linguistic evidence, it proposes the theory of cognitive resonance to suggests that neural processes compare similarities and differences between utterances perceived and existing knowledge to generate new knowledge, which can subsequently be used to process further utterances. Cognitive resonance is a physical, brain-based process facilitated by neural wave energy stimulated by perceiving language – verbal thought, speech, writing, or manual signaling – in the form of wave energy. This thesis finds that texts to be studied as literature are transmitted from author to auditor by way of physical media that separate them so that the auditor alone processes the perceived text as inner speech. Finally, this thesis identifies rhetoric and hermeneutics as complementary linguistic practices supported by the theory cognitive resonance for expression and understanding.
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION: THE ROOTS OF LITERARY CRITICISM...... 1
CHAPTER 2. THE ROOTS OF LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE...... 14
CHAPTER 3. THE ONTOGENY OF LANGUAGE...... 38
CHAPTER 4. THE THEORY OF COGNITIVE RESONANCE...... 61
CHAPTER 5. TEXT AS INNER SPEECH...... 85
CHAPTER 6. UNDERSTANDING: RHETORIC MEETS HERMENEUTICS.....108
ENDNOTES...... 129
LIST OF REFERENCES...... 139
1
Chapter 1. Introduction: the Roots of Literary Criticism
Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) opens with a hominid, probably australopithecus afarensis, standing erect and celebrating advantage in battle by tossing into the air the large bone he had used as a weapon. Perhaps Kubrick wanted to show the separation of hominids from other primates through technology, but at whatever point that separation began, its fulfillment was eventually realized, not just in technology or weaponry, but in something far more deadly, far more human, and far more divine: language. Today, on the precipice of an era some dare call post-human, much of our understanding of what language is and of its realization in those artistic forms called literature seems morassed in myth and metaphysics. This thesis takes a more radical approach, seeking the roots of literary criticism in the foundations of human nature.
This study will use the term literature to mean the artful practice of language and language in the sense expressed by Steven Pinker in The Language Instinct (1995) as the ability “to shape events in each other’s brains with exquisite precision” (15). Granted, these are broad definitions and purposefully so, because both language and literature cover a broad expanse of human experience. Pinker goes on to describe language as “a complex, specialized skill which develops in the child spontaneously, without awareness of its underlying logic, is qualitatively the same in every individual, and is distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently” (18). Language and literature are cognitive experiences, and they manifest themselves in sensuously physical phenomena.
This thesis pursues an understanding of the physical and cognitive activity that makes language happen in order to uncover and embrace a workable theory of literature. It asserts that the imaginative use of language is a physical human function, like sleeping, eating, and sex, and as such is fundamental to our well being as corporal entities. This is not romantic hyperbole; rather it is the direction this inquiry will take to link literature, as an artful practice of language, to cognition by approaching language as a brain-based faculty.
This project began with a line from Christopher Alexander’s declaration in A Timeless Way of Building (1979) that we, each of us, has “created his own language for himself, in his own brain” (342). How did Alexander know that? As initially encountered, that each of us has created his own language was a declaration rather than a conclusion, because Alexander offered no citations, attributions, or further explanation. Alexander himself is an architect, and this particular book offers a philosophical approach to architecture in human proportions. Before jumping to the conclusion that A Timeless Way of Building is outside the scope of language studies, however, know that Alexander called the companion volume A Pattern Language (1977) and that the concept of architecture as language infuses his work. Subsequent research suggested the possibility that architecture could be a language having its own generative grammar comparable to the language of words that make up literature, but this thesis is not about architecture.
The idea of language as personal invention compelled a drive to find answers to fundamental question about what language is while simultaneously it raised other questions. For example, if language is original to each individual, does this defeat the idea of social construction? If language is speech, can profoundly deaf infants, hearing no models, invent language? What is the role of modeling in generating language skills? Does thought come from language or is it something else altogether? Is language communication and if so might other communicating species have language and can they create literature? These questions, the questions they generate, and whatever answers might be found could lead to a comprehensive theory of literature and literary criticism anchored in the nature of language. At least finding a better understanding of what language is and where it comes from could put one closer and more knowledgeably in touch with the nature of literature.
The argument this thesis makes is that literature and critical theory are uniquely human endeavors that cannot be understood without first understanding the brain-based human nature that supports them. This chapter will provide a general foundation to the thesis by discussing the parameters of the study and dealing with some language issues that may raise barriers to clearly expressing the thesis, the research, and its outcomes.
In the final analysis, much of literary criticism comes down to a “Mt. Everest” approach. Although proffered as a “public service” in support of readers, one might suspect that literary criticism is written and published because as critics we can do it “because it is there.”1 As much as some may titter over the Romanticism of the title of Helen Vendler’s MLA inaugural address borrowed from Wordsworth’s The Prelude (reprinted in David Richter’s Falling into Theory (1994)), the probable cause for most, if not all, criticism might be reduced to “What we have loved, / Others will love, and we will teach them how” [emphasis added] (27). Despite the cynicism that motivates these observations, the practice of literary criticism does perform very useful services. But in Vendler’s terms, what is it really that we will teach them? If literature is the artful practice of language, what is language? How does it work? How does language become literature? These are difficult questions because every human has language, and as the next chapter will show, language is an essential aspect of humanity and literature is often its highest art.
In attempting to move among the often-conflicting positions that constitute critical theory, one is reminded of the legend of the six blind men and the elephant. When asked to describe the beast, each offered a different impression depending on where he touched it. The one who caught hold of its tail described the elephant as like a rope. The one who touched its leg said that it was like a tree. The one who touched its side thought it like a wall, and so on. In the different versions of the legend, the similes differ slightly, but the story remains the same. Among the individual descriptions offered, none accurately described the elephant. In fact, what each of these six blind men described individually is very much unlike an elephant, but these segments can come closer to resembling an elephant if one were to find a way to consolidate the six individual impressions.
Everyone who professes literature as creator, critic, or teacher stands in the midst of the mystery of language and literature, and from this interior perspective, it is difficult to assess its vastness or its fullness. One literary tradition seems to have been that we do know what language is and that literature is something that we, as educated readers, recognize when we see it. The Western literary tradition from Aristotle forward might be summarized by Sir Philip Sidney in The Defense of Poesy (1595/1970): “Poesy therefore, is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle terms it in the word mimesis [. . .] a speaking picture with this end, to teach and delight” (11) Much of the delight of literature was usually a matter of style. Then in the twentieth century, literary criticism shifted focus from a generally conceived stylistics to questions of interpretation or meaning. Combining the traditional view with current literary trends, one might ask if the purpose for seeking meaning is to teach and delight? Regardless of its purpose, how does literature make meaning? This is one of the questions asked by this inquiry, and it looks for answers in those mental faculties where learning, delight, and language all take place.
One of the daunting obstacles to a clear and concise exposition of the theory of cognitive resonance arises from the multiple layers, different dimensions, and paradoxical phenomena that constitute language. The most significant paradox is that of the private/public or individual/social aspects of language. This whole thesis will try to recognize and reconcile the multiplicity of language phenomena in the hope of clearing a path to explore the psycholinguistic underpinnings of cognitive resonance and the impact of cognitive resonance on literature.
One of the obstacles to understanding language is raised by language itself in its abundance of homonyms, words that sound alike and may even have the same spelling but have different meanings. Regardless of mode – spoken, manually signed, or written –a word is the smallest whole unit of meaning in language. Although phonemes, as units for meaning, may be smaller particles of language than words, the category of phoneme includes units that can only be used in combination with other phonemes, such as the s sound that denotes plurality in English. Steven Pinker observed in The Language Instinct (1995) that many words have multiple meanings, but that true synonyms occur rarely (156-57). Words with multiple meanings, even those with the same etymological roots, can be considered homonyms, and homonyms that sometimes appear without distinguishing modifiers in the writings of theoreticians, critics, or their interpreters can lead to misreadings. For example, the word writing as it is used in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s translation of Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1976) might possibly be a direct translation of the French words écrit, l’écrit, écriture, l’écriture, or écrivant, or even possibly other words not directly translatable from the French lexicon into writing. The differences between these words may be merely nuanced, but those nuances could be significant.2
Language, writing, and literature are not synonyms and are far from monolithic concepts. This chapter hopes to demonstrate that they consist of often overlapping, multifaceted or many-layered phenomena. The word phenomena was carefully chosen because not only are language, writing, and literature perceptible by the senses, it is only in the biologically physical realm that we ultimately come to terms with them. Even text, in the sense of markings visibly inscribed or dyed on a surface, is meaningless without the biological interaction that constitutes reading. Like a tree falling in a forest generating wave forms that can be interpreted as sound only when perceived by an ear directly or through an external ear-like instrument, text, in the sense of marks on a surface that reflect light waves or a tactile pattern as in Braille, can be interpreted as language only when perceived by an eye connected to a brain capable of making such interpretations. 3 This analogy can be extended to more complex audiovisual media where the text is recorded chemically on film or digitally on electronic media to be presented as images and sound through an appropriate playback device.
Attempting to write criticism and critical theory is further complicated by recent lexical shifts. Terms such as a text, theory, and discourse, among others, take on significantly different auras and meanings depending on the particular set of theoretical or political lenses through which they are projected or viewed. For the most part, these shifts move towards expanding the meanings of these terms to the point of creating new homonyms. In light of such lexical shifts, the writer must exert special care to make clear in what sense these terms are used with the expectation that the reader will respect that usage. Too often, these terms seem to be used in interchangeable senses without such clarification increasing the challenge to understand and make meaning.
Many difficulties arise from the presence of multiple canons of narrowly focused critical approaches, each absorbed in the specificity of their work so as to be unaware of other elements or aspects of study that may impinge on their theories. Classical criticism arising out of poetics and rhetoric seem more focused on the technique and affect of language than on language itself. As biological phenomena, language, writing, and literature do not acquiesce to Platonic idealism or Western metaphysics. Western philologists, who seem racially invested in proving some kind of linguistic superiority in their etymological quest for an urlanguage avoided the notion that language is sensual. Despite having established solid roots in twentieth-century linguistic and philosophical study, Saussurian semiology seems to present more problems than enlightenment. In accepting Derrida’s critique of Saussure’s defining writing as secondary (sign of a sign), the methods provided for by Saussurian semiology are less than a complete treatment of language. Simultaneously, the semiology practiced by such constructionists as Roland Barthes seems to engage what appear to be “extralinguistic” phenomena: the signification of phenomena ranging from photographs to religious dress to the spectacle of wrestling embraces modes of expression that seem to go beyond language or extends the definition of language by such breadth that its study may be unsuitably applied to literature. In this light, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, may be asking the wrong question in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), because her famous essay is a hermeneutic of gesture, an interpretation of motivation for ambiguous signs that cannot easily be questioned. The strategies offered by deconstruction seem to be reflective processes worked on or played at on the semantic level. These philosophies, disciplines, or approaches to language and literature seem to manifest a one sidedness whose arguments tend to shut out other possibilities, erecting barriers to understanding rather than illuminating a larger field on inquiry. Although each seems incomplete in itself, none is wrong, and all may contribute in one way or another to a multidimensional understanding of language, writing, and literature. Where possible, this thesis will try to find connections that may help to include otherwise disparate critical practices.
In casting a wide net to capture a comprehensive understanding of literature as a natural human phenomenon, this inquiry will use science in a way that explains how the brain creates and uses language and literature. This approach to science will be from the perspective of conceptual integration, an idea promoted by Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, and Jerome H. Barkow in The Adapted Mind (1992).4 “A conceptually integrated theory is one framed so that it is compatible with data and theory from other relevant fields” (4). The Adapted Mind, subtitled Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, applies findings from the natural sciences, primarily biology, to the social sciences, because human beings are biological creatures and their biology impacts their psychological and social behavior theories. Any theory of language and literature that draws on brain-based phenomena the way that cognitive resonance does must also be compatible with the biology and psychology that describe the brain and its functions.
This thesis does not use the concept of conceptual integration or conceptual blending as developed by Mark Turner. Turner’s use of conceptual integration is a later adoption, first appearing in 1998 as the title of an article in Cognitive Science co-authored with Giles Fauconnier called “Conceptual Integration Networks” (1998). Conceptual blending is a diagrammatic analysis of how the mind constructs a new concept by comparing two existing concepts. It has become a significant movement in the cognitive sciences and draws extensively on George Lakoff’s work in metaphor. Superficially, the idea looks a lot like cognitive resonance; the difference between blending and cognitive resonance has to do with the support of psycholinguistics and brain biology which cognitive resonance draws upon. Without the support of psycholinguistics and brain biology, both blending and cognitive resonance are reduced to metaphor with scant evidentiary support for their theoretical validity. Blending, at least for this project, does not provide the fundamental support sought. The presence of blending expressed as conceptual integration as a field of inquiry in cognitive sciences further points up the abiding conflict of words that have multiple meanings.
This study will use science to provide evidence in support of its thesis because such science is available, and literature can include all human experience, real and imagined. One of Sir Philip Sidney’s arguments in The Defence of Poesie was that the poet’s work encompasses all knowledge:
Now does the peerless poet perform both [the work of the philosopher and the historian], for whatsoever the philosopher says should be done, he gives a perfect picture of it by some one, by whom he presupposes it was done, so as he couples the general notion with the particular example. (17)